Replication package- Fiscal Commons and the Education–Growth Nexus: Fiscally-Mediated Threshold Activation Across Developing Economies

This paper introduces the Fiscally-Mediated Threshold Activation (FMTA) hypothesis: government expenditure constitutes a fiscal commons whose scale determines whether education spending generates positive growth externalities. Below a critical threshold, complementary public inputs are insufficient to activate human capital returns; above it, education spending delivers large, significant growth returns. A formal OLG model nests Galor and Zeira (1993) and Barro (1990) as limiting cases. Hansen's (1999) panel threshold regression across 115 countries (1970–2023) estimates the global threshold at 31.90% of GDP, with above-threshold education returns of 0.466 (p < 0.01) and below-threshold returns indistinguishable from zero. Five regional samples document a threshold-return complementarity: higher estimated thresholds co-occur with lower above-threshold returns, consistent with the structural mechanism derived from the model. Within Sub-Saharan Africa, the CFA franc monetary architecture constrains Francophone fiscal expansion to the neighbourhood of the activation threshold — keeping Francophone country-years predominantly in the inactivated regime — while Anglophone SSA operates above it, providing a natural quasi-experiment in fiscal regime assignment. The replication package includes all Stata do-files, the full 115-country panel dataset (1970–2023), and output tables sufficient to reproduce all reported results. Submitted to the Journal of Economic Growth.